Naked Singularity Big Read: Beyond the Zero

To start this week’s section, we are once again with Casi and Dane hashing out their plan. I’m curious to know how everyone feels about these conversations between that De La Pava keeps giving to us. There’s been an awful lot of Casi and Dane hashing out their plan over the past hundred pages or so, but by and large it’s worked very well for me. Even as the conversations have overlaid on similar points and themes, I feel like De La Pava has kept the plot moving forward briskly and has constantly injected new energy into what they’re discussing, so that the repetition has not been noticeable.

In the middle of Dane and Casi’s first conversation in this week’s section, Casi thinks the following, which I found of much thematic interest:

My relationship to the plan was dysfunctional. Dane evinced so little doubt about its eventual efficacy, about its perfection and our ability and need to properly carry it out, that the whole thing became something more than real yet somehow still distant. If reality is sometimes so intense and bizarre that it feels like bad, unpersuasive fiction, then this was a fiction so powerful it outrealized reality. The whole thing scared me in a way that made me involuntarily cognizant of my every cardiopulmonary move; the ways a body keeps itself alive. [438-9; my italics]

In this section we also see a lot of alternating conversations between Dane and Casi and Toom and Casi, each discussing their respective plans. Here De La Pava is driving home the contrasts between the goals and methods of each, one seeking perfection within the law, the other seeking perfection outside of it. I was also intrigued by Toom’s repeated use of the phrase “gaping hole” on pp 444-45 and its similarity to what a naked singularity is.

Casi’s plane flight to Alabama, which begins chapter 20, [456-63] is quite strange and further evidence of his loosening grip on reality. My interpretation of the flight is that Casi is watching an in-flight movie, but instead of being a normal movie it’s unspooling in his head as he watches it. The two paragraphs beginning at the bottom of page 458 and ending in the middle of 459 discuss the relationship of cinematic reality to what we generally consider our reality and further underscore the feeling of plotlessness and lack of control that is increasingly taking over Casi’s subjectivity.

And then, after the flight, Casi arrives at his hotel, called The Orchard, which is such an overwhelmingly aestheticized environment that one questions its exact relationship to reality. The name “The Orchard” is clearly a reference to The Garden of Eden, what with the S.E.R.P.E.N.T. group that is having a conference there. In a bit of metafictional brio Casi seems to recognize this and offer some questioning incredulity to the handiwork of his own creator:

“You’re kidding right? Serpent in the gardens? Is this some kind of put-on? Where’s the hidden camera? Next you’ll tell me I’m not allowed in the Apple wing.” [465]

In addition to this, the name of The Orchard’s manager is “Big Mac,” the unbelievability of which Casi lingers over for a paragraph or so, and in general the hotel seems far too good to be true. Rather than see all this as clumsiness on De la Pava’s part, I view this over the top symbolism as purposeful, the author’s way of indicating Casi’s increasing break from reality and retreat into a constructed world of his (?) own creation. This seems to be emblematic of the book’s increasing retreat into smaller and smaller cycles of the same plotlines, as though everything is being pushed into more and more rarefied territory, the book relentlessly moving toward its own margins. This, I think, has to do with something Thomas Pynchon called “Beyond the Zero” in Gravity’s Rainbow. In addition and oddly enough, despite all the heavy-handed imagery, The Orchard also does serve to give an Edenistic feel, and I think it works as a symbol, even in spite of De La Pava going out of his way to make it obvious to us for other reasons.

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I keep swinging back and forth betwen SirJack and the others…this books has pissed me off like none other recently; at the same time, I find myself heedlessly reading headlong through the fray…I’m trying to analyze this: is it the voice? It must be, because there’s not much else that holds up under sober, daylight analysis, and yet I read this book endlessly each night, and turned those freakin’ pages one after the other without much resistance…but the ending…ugh. Sorry. I’ll wait until the final week…

By the way, I tip my hat to you (I think) SirJack…god, I miss Javier Marias right now…the experience of reading Your Face Tomorrow, for the first time, page after page…man, there will be NOTHING like that, I fear (and hope I’m wrong), and fear…

I also took the inflight movie pretty much at face value. Terms of Endearment? When I got to the Orchard Hotel and Big Mac, it made me cringe a bit and I was afraid the author was coming adrift, but then it started to sound a bit like a Murakami novel and immediately afterwards (not at all in a Murakami way) comes one of the most challenging and poignant scenes with the prison guard and Jalen Kingg. The contrast with the luxury of the Orchard Hotel is extreme, yet both are cut off from communication with the “real” world. I was really struck by the guard’s complaint that everyone wants the death penalty, but no one wants to be the one to carry it out, his combination of a weird and weary compassion and a pragmatic account of his difficulties. The anti-sympathy file was sad and chilling. Casi is trying to be a good person but his realm of work is so morally ambivalent and compromised (as indicated way back by the taxi driver’s question). Later Conley points out that Jalen’s fate is of miniscule importance (sadly irrelevant) in the light of huge universal questions of Dark Energy and Dark Matter.